


Landing

by Davechicken



Series: The Pilot and his Dark Knight [6]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-27
Updated: 2016-05-27
Packaged: 2018-07-10 14:36:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6989257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Davechicken/pseuds/Davechicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You only ever needed to make one mistake.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Landing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [beautifullights](https://archiveofourown.org/users/beautifullights/gifts).



> **CONTENT WARNING:** As expected, please note this response contains physical injury, emotional people, despair, danger, peril, &c&c&c. H/C is where I first cut my teeth, after all. _Caveat lector_. With the note that this is _me_ we’re talking about… so. XD

You only ever needed to make one mistake. What was it his flight instructor used to say? “There’s no ‘almost’ landing a ship.” And while someone else had pointed out that you could walk away from many kinds of crashes, his instructor had fixed them with the coldest, most soul-chilling gaze Poe had ever witnessed.

“Yes, from many, but your ship won’t, and if you’re already to the point of ‘crash or die’, you’ve fucked up. And you better hope it’s the kind of not-landing you can walk away from.”  


Poe had always known the dangers inherent in flying, especially flying something as fast and fine as an X-Wing: so close through the cockpit to the death outside, so fast to dart in or out of harm’s way. So near to torpedoes and cannon-fire, so close to the front line. You didn’t join the Republic - or Resistance - Navy because you wanted a quiet, safe life. No, you joined because you wanted to do good things, and wanted those good things as a legitimising patina over your very real death-courting adrenaline-cravings. 

But knowing was one thing, wasn’t it? You could say: _that water-boiler is hot_ , but you didn’t really understand what a scald would feel like until you’d experienced it. No amount of graphs, or statistics, or first-hand accounts was the same as **feeling** it. And even if you saw other people go down, even if you watched their ships explode into rosy space-petals… even if you saw their locker cleared, and you never spoke to them again… it was distant. It had to be, or you’d spend your life paralysed by fear. 

You couldn’t remember pain, not fully. It was always somewhat dulled, and so was emotional pain. Poe remembered not to touch scalding-hot water, but sometimes he found himself staring. Trying to pull back the memory of _why_ , and unable to, not fully. The self-destructive urge to just see that it _wasn’t as bad as your mind seems to think it is_ … no. No, he couldn’t…

So when _Black One_ went down, durasteel screeching in protest, his astromech bleeping furious warnings in Binary, Poe was… he didn’t know how to feel about it? He didn’t, because how did you feel in that situation? His beautiful ship was his pride and joy, after his droid. She was reliable and fast and perfect, and he’d done her wrong. He’d let some electric streak slice through her guts, and she was in her death throes. First the portside S-Foils failed, and then his sublights burned black smog into the air outside the cockpit. BB-8 shrieked at him to evacuate, to pull the cord, to eat space…

But the G-Forces in the downspiral were too much. His hand froze where it reached, and Poe felt his whole face peel almost clean off his skull. The pressure got higher and higher, the vista through his transparisteel viewscreen dizzyingly spinning faster, and he didn’t even manage to reply before he blacked out.

***

Life was supposed to flash before your eyes, just before you passed. Wasn’t it? Although who said that: people who didn’t quite die hard enough, or people who just wanted a bit of comfort about the thoughts of final moments? 

What went through Poe’s mind was three things: 

1\. I’ll never get to apologise to my father

2\. I just had _Black One_ in for maintenance, what a waste of Resistance time and money

and

3\. I hope Kylo can’t feel this

Those three thoughts on rotation in some weird, limbo-state. He couldn’t see, or maybe it was just all red-black outside? The first sense to come back was his hearing, and it was a weird collection of dying bee-bee-beeps and groaning, cooling hot metal. Next came the sensation of weight and heat, a pressure across his upper thighs and the fact his face was burning up. He tried to move his hands to pull the helmet off, to cool down, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t move them, and he couldn’t see, and panic shot through him like a rumour through a squadron, and his eyes blinked wetly. They were open, but he still couldn’t see.

_BB-8. Buddy. Buddy? BUDDY?_

He tried to call out, but he wasn’t even sure if the words were inside, or outside, of his head. His lips tasted metalblood and he realised he was hurt, somewhere. Maybe multiple somewheres. He was in - in shock? Or maybe just altered consciousness, and he didn’t know if the periods of darker sensation were him falling out of the world before falling back in or not. He couldn’t see the dashboard to see the time, or the status of the ship (he was still in it, right? The feeling of a band under his jaw, of a cross-the-heart harness, of the joystick, the throttle against his knee), but it couldn’t be good. 

Calm. Keep calm. That’s what they told you to do, in this situation. (Hah.) Ignore the adrenaline flooding your body, ignore how it took away your gross motor function. Or… did for some people. Reactions to adrenaline differed, with some people reduced to shaking, babbling messes. Other people used it like it was intended by nature, their mind going faster and sharper. Poe was normally the latter category: he’d see things slow down, like it was a computer sim he could run at one tenth speed, and have time to make his decisions. Everything came in louder, but he processed it deeper, too. It was likely why he was so good at his job (normally, present circumstances excepted), because he acted first, thought second. Or, he did think, but with that primitive flinch-mind reaction, and processed it with the more mature and sensible, rational parts of him later on.

Think.

He tried to take stock of his body, and found he could wiggle fingers (and toes? He sent the thought, but wasn’t sure if it was obeyed or not) and not much else. He could move his head, but it hurt, and obviously he had breathable air. It tasted rank, but it wasn’t killing him immediately, so that was good.

The ship had stayed still, he was sure, because his inner ear wasn’t sloshing. There was some minor tilt-turn sensation, but nothing like a full on free-fall. That meant _landing_. In one sense. Not sure yet if it was the kind he could walk away from, but that would come in time. He couldn’t hear his droid, but that could either be because the intercomm was down, or because - because… no. He couldn’t think about the BB-unit being unmoored somewhere, or damaged irreparably. It just wasn’t on the list of things Poe Dameron would accept right now. 

No BB-8 meant maybe no distress call, but surely the droid would have given one before he crashed? Yes. He would. So someone would come for him… if they could. He was sure any of his squadron would drop everything for him, like he would for them, and he just hoped they got here in time.

Hoped there still was time. The lack of a real triage of himself was making this hard. He felt light seeping into his eyes, and hissed a bloody mess at the sting of it. A cough, and he felt saliva mixed with his own blood pour down his chin. _Not. Good_. Vision slowly returned, and he could see the cockpit was cracked and leaking in the noxious black smoke, and see the dashboard was totally dead. No readouts at all. He turned his head with difficulty, seeing his legs looked fine, but… not so much higher up. Above where his hands lay useless on his lap, there was a deep and sticky mess of blood somewhere above his hip, below his ribs. He thought. Kind of hard to pinpoint it properly, and he wondered if anything integral had been ruptured, or if the blood was all muscle-and-flesh. 

He tried to lift a hand, tried to staunch the flow, but his arms felt weak and not his own. Then - oh _then_ \- the pain hit. Like a roiling wave of atmospheric turbulence, sending everything inside through ninety degrees in a dimension Humans weren’t meant to perceive. He laughed, because how else did you deal with a pain so utter that you wanted to throw up? It sent more blood out of his mouth, and he gagged at the taste and the sticky, gelatinous cloying in the back of his throat. A moment of worry that he’d _choke on his own blood_ that made his mind tunnel down into - into - 

**Calm yourself, Dameron. This is not how you survive.**

This was not how he went out, was it? On some planet he couldn’t even remember, alone and… not unmourned. At least he knew that, though it wasn’t really a comfort. It would almost be better if he was _nobody,_ because then he could just be a number, a statistic. He’d be a red mark in the figures of war, not - not someone’s… not someone’s something.

His father had written him off as already dead the minute he’d signed over to the Resistance, he knew. Maybe for the best, he’d grieved his son as lost to the same ideals his mother had spent her life for. He’d just know he was right when he got the holo-message confirming his death. He was - was he still down as next of kin?

Poe couldn’t even remember. He’d changed it, right? When he’d really got serious with Kylo? Or had he? Damn, now he couldn’t check. Kylo would… know, right? He’d know that a name on a file wasn’t anything, even if…

…fuck.

Now he’d done it. He’d been trying not to think about Kylo. It just hurt too much, and a pain worse than the throbbing in his side, or the ache in his spine, or the cramp in his trapped legs. He tried harder to pull the release catch keeping him in, but he just _could not move_. No matter how hard he visualised it, how much he watched his ethereal hand following his command, it just **would not**. He was trapped, and Kylo… would he know?

Would he feel the pain and distress, across light-years? Would he be able to tell Poe was hurt, or just in peril? Would he suffer, or would it just be a niggling sense? He’d never had occasion to ask, and now he was glad he hadn’t. If he was suffering, the thought of inflicting it on a Kylo who couldn’t do anything to alleviate his injuries made him sicker again. 

Kylo. His Kylo. Already gone through far too much in his life, now left with this. He knew his lover was head over heels in a way that might make other men shy from the intensity, but to Poe it had never felt like something bad. Possibly that said a lot about his ego that he needed it stroking so firmly, that he needed the depth of affection Kylo had offered him. He’d loved being so important to someone _so important_. Loved over and above, needed and– needed so much that he helped him heal, helped him come back from the Dark, and–

Poe choked, head swimming, and wished he could stop thinking about him, but telling someone to not think about something was the surest way to make them think of it, wasn’t it?

Kylo. Strong, fierce, wonderful Kylo. Kylo who had walked on both sides of the Force: drenched in Light, clad in Dark. Kylo, who did nothing by halves: who was never able to moderate himself. He loved, or he hated. He loved so deeply that he’d pull apart a planet in his passions, who would fight until his breath was gone for what he believed in. 

Kylo. So raw, so exposed to the world, without the shielding everyone else had. His nerves laid bare like a man turned inside out, twitching, and lacking the filter between thought and mouth. Kylo. Who had suffered so much, and who could still love, even after it all. He’d never given up on life, although Poe didn’t understand how. He’d broken out of Snoke’s control, faced everyone, and he had… a life… now, right? Without Poe.

He’d made friends. He’d been accepted by the Resistance, and not just those who had the memory of Ben as an undertone to his later behaviour. He’d be okay. His mother, Leia, would look out for him. Hell, Rey, Finn, Snap… he had people. Maybe not Poe, but he could… survive without him? 

(The part of him that hissed in protest, that wished he wouldn’t, that jealously wanted to be the only one enough for him - he hated it, and he couldn’t make it go away. He couldn’t make it leave, even though it was _wrong_. It was not the Poe people thought he was, even though it was who he really was. Glory, respect, love… of course he wanted those. He tried not to, tried to be selfless, but who really could turn it all off? Not him.)

Kylo could go on. He wanted him to. He did, but… no. It was selfish to want him to remain alone, like his father. His father, who had at least had a son left to love, and Kylo who had nothing to remember him by. He should move on, even if the thought of his beloved with someone else made him _scream_ , made his hand move through the agony, made him slam the button and pound with his elbow, forcing the cockpit to open. His legs didn’t work, but jealous hatred made his left arm strong. Out went the cockpit, and then went the pilot. He fell to cold, soft sands and he realised it was night-time, wherever he was. The sand would get into his wound, and he’d… if he even made it he’d…

Poe rolled onto his back, closing his eyes. He’d made things worse, though now he could lie down and see the stars. His momentary rush of ability left him cold and shuddering in its wake, and he stretched out like a bloody star of his own. He’d seep out into the sands, stain them with his death, and that was probably right. Sandwiched here, between the skies that had been his home, and the earths that forever tugged him back down with their gravity… at least there would be a body to grieve, and not just a missing number, a hole at the table, in the hangar. He’d be found, and they could know for certain he was gone.

The pilot closed his eyes.

 _I’m sorry_.

So sorry. He wasn’t enough. Wasn’t good enough, or fast enough. Wasn’t aware enough, or safe enough. Took too many risks. Cut too many corners. Flew too close to the sun, and scorched his wings. He’d played the bad odds for too long, and now he got to pay the debt, to place the credits over his eyes and settle any fee with the–

Cold. So cold. Sand under his fingers soft. He’d still likely do it the same, given the chance. Still throw himself headlong into life, into death. Cold. Colder… and then a pounding in the dunes. A pounding, rhythmic drumsong like his heartbeat fading. Dundun - dundun. Over and over, and a darker shadow, blotting out the stars he could no longer see with anything but his mind’s eye. No need to navigate, not now. Not that he’d know how, not from here. Darkness, and it must be the end, though the sudden lurch and heat was unexpected.

Was it a memory? His body’s final rejection? The last pulse of iron through his veins? Why did he feel like hands lifted him, without floating? Even now, betrayed. No sense of release, of relief. Instead a jolt like the hyperdrive kicking in, and a pressure on his wound and words urgent and distant.

What was… what was going on?

“ _You stay with me, Poe. Don’t you dare die now.”_  


A voice he recognised, but it shouldn’t be here. It should be alive, and he was not. The movement knocked him sideways out of his body, and everything went pitch.

***

Wetwetwetwetcan’tbreathecan’tmovecan’tfeeleverythingfloating… Poe thrashed, lost and drowning. Wet, so wet, and he couldn’t–

 _Poe. It’s okay. I’m here. Just rest, please. We’re going to make sure you heal_.

Kylo? He tried to speak, but then he realised he was muzzled in a mask that helped him breathe. Everything was soggy, murky, and then he put two and two together. Bacta?

_You’re in a Bacta tank, yes. You took a lot of damage. But you’ll heal. Everything will heal. I’ll make sure of it. Just… rest, please. Would you like me to help you sleep?_

Poe wanted to be awake and aware, not distant, but he couldn’t properly communicate like this. That and it still _hurt_. He didn’t want to close his eyes again in case he didn’t wake back up. 

_I’m here. I promise. You’re going nowhere without me, Dameron_.

It was still a little freaky that Kylo could talk to him like that. It had always been freaky. His eyes blinked through liquid, stinging as he saw the dark shadow of a tall man on the other side of the tank. A pink smudge of hand, and he reached weakly to not-touch.

Okay. Okay.

Okay.

***

Poe came to as they hosed him warmly down. He had arms around him, strong arms, and he knew it was Kylo. He leaned against him as the Bacta was washed off, shaking with the effort. His weight wasn’t on his legs, but it was still hard to stand.

He ached, but it was the ache of exhaustion and lack of use, not injury, now. He had no idea how long he’d been out, but it had been long enough. He’d lost a lot of blood, he knew, and done some very deep injuries. He hoped the fact he was being held up by a Dark-sort-of Jedi meant none of the injuries were terminal. Dying alone and on the dunes was one thing, dying in the care of his Kylo was something abhorrent and wrong.

Hands around him, and he tried to hold himself, and then relented and let his lover’s strength keep him upright. He couldn’t talk, and he wavered in and out until - towelled dry - he was gently dressed and put in bed. 

When he lay down, he felt a hand around his.

“You’re going to be okay.”   


He thought Kylo’s voice was real, but it was hard to tell if it came from outside, or in. He gripped back, weakly, and breathed.

“You… came for me?” The words were hard to say, his lips still cracked and his throat dry, despite the Bacta-bath.  


“I’ll always come for you, Poe.” Lips across his temple, and a sense of security that poured through him.  


“Thank you,” he whispered, and slept easier.  


***

Fingers in his hair. Curling, curling, curling. The warmth of a body against his side, the knowledge he was home, safe. The pain was there, but further. Further, or easier to handle.

A familiar smell, a pattern of breathing that was _him_. Kylo. Kylo had come to save him, had pulled him from the wreckage. A low bee-bee-beep that wasn’t panic-stricken, and his eyes opened.

“BB-8?”  


Out of sight, his astromech chirruped in the affirmative.

“He got you too?”  


“Of course I did,” Kylo chided, gently. “You’re a package deal, after all.”  


Somehow that hurt even harder, and he rolled into his Kylo. If he had his droid, and his boyfriend, he could take on the galaxy. Just… when he could stand for more than just to void his bladder, okay? Yeah. They owed him that much of a rest.

“I love you,” he whispered.  


“Good,” Kylo said, into his cheek.   


Poe didn’t even have the energy to hit him, but it could slide, for once. Kylo told him in plenty of other ways, after all. For now, arms around him said more than any words ever would, and it was - it was good. The galaxy was good. He was good.

Yeah. Definitely take a break before he climbed back into the cockpit, and not feel guilty at all.


End file.
